Data Show Fewer Students

Decrease Of 90 In Early Report

BRISTOL — Preliminary figures show school enrollments in the city decreasing by about 90 students this year, mostly at the high schools and middle schools.

The population at Bristol Eastern High School appears to be dipping the most sharply, with nearly 70 fewer students attending compared with last year, according to a report by schools Personnel Director Anthony Malavenda.

And enrollments in some elementary schools are down, too, most notably at Hubbell and Ivy Drive. But numbers are up nearly 10 percent over last year at Greene-Hills and Stafford schools, and some classes at Edgewood and South Side are close to capacity, Malavenda reported.

Kindergarten classes at Edgewood and first-grade classes at Ivy Drive are already so big that the school system won't assign any late-registering pupils there. Instead, the school system will provide transportation so they can attend classes at other schools, Malavenda said in a report to the school board this week.

Malavenda emphasized that those figures are based on registration as of Wednesday and aren't official. Connecticut schools compare their annual enrollments by measuring them each Oct. 1, when most transfers, withdrawals and late registrations have been completed.

``The numbers we have now aren't official, they're still changing day to day,'' Malavenda said Thursday.

The schools had 8,906 students enrolled on Wednesday, compared with 8,995 Oct. 1 last year.

The school system has still not measured whether there was another increase in students from low-income or impoverished families. Last year, the city reported that nearly 30 percent of its students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, a prime indicator of low income or poverty. It was the biggest percentage in 10 years.

``We've been getting poorer,'' Malavenda said.

Bristol has launched a series of remediation and early intervention programs to help those youngsters, whose grades and standardized test scores often lag behind other students'.

In his review of Connecticut Mastery Test scores, Supervisor of Technology and Testing Richard Gagliardi noted that Bristol has seen a rising percentage of students from poor homes. In addition, more special education students are taking the CMTs than in the past, he said.

``And these groups are going to influence the average overall district scores,'' he said.

Last year, 633 of the Bristol youngsters in grades four, six or eight who took the CMTs were eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches. That number was 529 three years earlier, and has risen each year since.

Malavenda said an update on poverty levels among this year's student body might be issued in the late fall.